


Things You Said When We First Met

by somekindofseizure



Series: Things You Said [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, blonde scully, prompts, revival, things you said
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 01:46:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7488525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure





	Things You Said When We First Met

******

She has a towel around her head when she comes out of the bathroom.   The stubborn summer sunset lingers in the room like a kid who keeps finding excuses to stay awake.  Now it picks up the cornflower blue of her eyes, the deep blood red of her old robe, and those are good enough excuses for him.

The robe is one of the things she’s brought back to the house.  At first it was a shock to him, that she wouldn’t be doing it all at once, getting a truck one day, handing the keys over to her landlord, moving back home. Of course that’s his way, and not hers. Scully doesn’t jump in.  

He’s delighted each time he notices the additions:  her lower-watt hair dryer in the drawer, her less expensive moisturizer in the medicine cabinet, the ancient red bathrobe on the back of the door. Delighted, but terrified.  These are the expendable versions of her things, the backups, the ones she can live without.  He only has one thing he can’t live without.  There is no backup Scully.

“What’s with the towel? I thought I heard a hair dryer in there,” he says, folding his hands over his chest and crossing his feet at the ankles, a trick he’s learned to avoid tackling her to the bed.  It’s not just the bedroom that does this to him lately – the kitchen, the living room, the porch – he’s become a medium through which the house tells her it misses her.

“You did,” she says. “I just didn’t want it to be a shock.” 

“Want what to be a shock?”

“I don’t want you to make a big deal out of it.”

“Unless you’ve got a pair of horns under there, I’m pretty sure I can handle it.”  She licks her lips quickly and looks down as she reaches for the tip of the towel.  It unravels to the floor and her hair falls to her shoulders, bright and dry.  He was wrong.  Sometimes Scully jumps in.  

“Is it… it’s blonde?” She holds her chin up high with a haughty shrug.

“Well, you’ll get used to it,” she says, crawling over his feet onto her side of the bed and putting her back to him.

“Not if you refuse to look at me from now on.”

“I’m not refusing, I’m just watching the sunset.”  The nonchalance-coated embarrassment makes his heart squeak in his chest.  Scully can handle almost anything except the mortal phenomenon of vanity.

He paws his fingers through it, parting the strands of gold and almost white, an occasional strawberry twinged wave where the bleach didn’t quite take.  He knows stuff about bleach from the last time she dyed her hair, when he helped.

“I love it.”  That’s what he forgot to say right away last time. Years ago in a motel somewhere in the southwest, her eyes stoic in the mirror as he combed plastic gloves through the goo and wiped it off her ears.  She wouldn’t pay the finished product the respects of drying it, made him take her to bed with her hair wet.  He remembers being grateful she had something to resent besides him, something that was probably less deserving.

“It feels weird, like I’m cheating, like I’m not myself.”

“You’ve been blonde before.”

“Not without some kicking and screaming,” she says and chuckles.

Right, the night before the bleach.  He can still remember the way his face stung as her palm left it, the way her wet body slipped against him, the way her lifted heels pressed into the front of his shins.

“It’s just easier to keep the grey out of this,” she says with a sigh.  He gasps in mock surprise.

“You have grey hairs, Scully?”  She shoves him with her hip and he pads her temples with his fingertips. “I like blondes. I mean of course I liked you red, but blondes are good too.”

“But I’m not a _real_ blonde.”

“You know I don’t make serious distinctions between real and fake.”

Her ear twitches with a smile.  He breathes her in, the seductive scent of the chemicals they use to mask the dye, their promise of reinvention.  The kind he employed last time was cheap and vulgar, smelled only of bleach, made no promises at all.  He remembers her relief the day she was able to dye it back to red and wonders lazily if she’ll do that this time.  He couldn’t care less.  

He runs his fingers down the tendon in her neck to the soft inner collar of the red robe.

“Do you remember what you said to me when we first met?”

“Something about Billy Miles?”

“No, I mean in the bed.”

She is quiet, soft skin of her shoulder breathing into his palm as he slips the edge of her twenty year-old bathrobe down and back.  The material is less luxurious now, tired and pilled from the dryer, but it gives him the same rush of excitement seeing it come down her back as it did when she showed him those bites. He notes the way her hair matches her skin now rather than her freckles.

“I was lying behind you, just like this, staring at the back of your head and you said we didn’t have the same idea of what ‘real’ was.”

Her voice is sleepy and soft, a request for a bedtime story. He is the one telling it, but she's the only one who knows whether it'll end happily..

“And what did you say?”

“I said that we’d have to work on it.”  He nuzzles his face to the back of her jaw as his palm drops down over her breast, her nipple hardening despite the humid heat. “Then we went to sleep.”

“Well, we’ve at least made progress in that area,” she says as she rounds her body into his, flexing the small of her back into him.  She turns her face up into her hair with a murmur as she links a leg back over his, pulling his erection a little closer.  “So then, you like it?”

“I like it.”

“As much as the red?”

“Yes.”

“More, maybe?”  She’s teasing him, baiting him.  His hand traces her belly, dips into her navel, slides over her pelvic bone.

“Is this one of those things where your friend breaks up with her boyfriend and you say she’s better off without him and then he comes back and you feel like an asshole?”

“I wasn’t going to introduce you to any of my boyfriends.”  He grabs her shoulder and flips her over.  She laughs for a few moments as he grits his teeth in faux anger.  Then, with her hair falling into her eyes, she straddles him.  She takes her time, moves one muscle at a time, and he thinks, this is still his Scully, still cautious, still an expert at delicious torture.  The robe is around her waist, still half-tied.  There are no mosquito bites to study now, but he has the same question he did that night. _How long will you stay?_

The sky has finally tucked the sun in, and the cool moonlight casts her blue eyes even bluer, her blonde hair even blonder, paints her into one of Vermeer’s wet dreams.   Her pointer finger lands on his nose, journeys over his lips, down to the elastic of his underwear and he snaps to sit up as she takes him into her hand. He counts the familiar items, the clues she’ll be staying.  The tuck of one side of her mouth under her teeth, the tighten-release routine of her stomach muscles, the weight of her forehead as it falls to his.   He captures the nape of her neck in his hand and grips her hair at its roots.

“ _Feels_ real,” he says, wondering if they have yet reached agreement on the meaning of the word.  Her voice comes in a bombshell shade of breathless, mysterious enough to make him wonder.

“Yes… it does.”


End file.
